The word gets out

Diogenes at Catholic World News has - as usual - an excellent post, this time reflecting on the many protesters throughout the world to the teachings of the Church:

The point is that, in terms of communicating the hard teachings, you don't need to have everyone on board. You don't even need a majority. As long as one Catholic bishop remains to point a finger at the immemorial doctrine of the Church and say, "God taught this," the outraged indignation will sprout as fast as the costume miters. Look at it this way: anyone determined to ignore Christian sexual morality in the contemporary West would have to search long and hard before he bumped against a real inconvenience to his lifestyle; he's already gained all the civil liberties worth gaining. What drives him to fury, and chasubles, is the existence of persons who still have the temerity to say: you won, but you're wrong.

Anti-Catholicism in general, like anti-popery in particular, is protean, and changes form according to changing fears of what stands to be lost by the intrusion of Church teaching: in fact, it's a kind of projection of social acrimony onto a recognizable human enemy. Bushido Japan was alarmed by Christian rules of combat, Brahmin India by emancipation of the untouchables, and the contemporary élites ... by what contemporary élites consider indispensable and shudder at the thought of forsaking. As Phil Lawler has said, if you meet some stranger on the street-corner, and he says he's got problems with Church teaching, you know he's not telling you he's a monophysite.